Kingdom Come: Deliverance Skill Preview

A recent trailer for Warhorse Studios’ Kingdom Come: Deliverance introduced us to the game’s intricate first-person combat, however, since this is an RPG, the trailer might have left you wondering about the role-playing systems that govern that combat. This is where this Rock, Paper, Shotgun article comes in with its preview of Kingdom Come’s skill system, that features a prominent skill tree that governs your alcohol consumption. You can check out the article for some screenshots, and here’s an excerpt from its text part:

The enormous open world is attractive and enticing, but it’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s skill trees that made me a believer in this historical RPG. Rather than providing mild improvements to sword-handling or stamina, the things you learn are traits that change the way your character interacts with the world and the people in it. It all suggests I’ll be creating a person with knowledge and foibles as I play rather than tweaking a sheet of stats.

[…]

Sometimes a game’s world makes me wish I could step into the screen and see it first-hand. Kingdom Come gave me an altogether different sensation; these are places that feel just about familiar enough that I might well have experienced something similar first-hand already. It’s the thrill of recognition mixed with the different country that is the past.

Put all of that to one side for now though because I want to talk about the character-building rather than the world. There’s an entire branch of skills dedicated to drinking. You can see a sample of it below.

Other choices lock you into a wine-tasting life, giving you a higher tolerance to grapes than hops, or give you an uncanny ability to find your way back home even when you drink to the point of senselessness . At a certain point of inebriation you’ll pass out but will always wake up in a safe place. It’s the 15th century equivalent of a beer scooter.

Then there are literacy skills, which go beyond letting you read and can extend to knowledge of certain types of literature. Learn about sacred art and visiting a church or monastery allows you to contemplate paintings and architectural qualities, giving you a sense of wellbeing that (I think) allows you to recuperate faster when resting. I say I think because clicking through the skill menus was like vanishing down a rabbit hole – there were so many paths in the warren that I can’t remember precisely what I saw while I was losing myself in it all.

Even combat skills, which could be the most tediously traditional of the lot, provide new apparently historically accurate martial arts relating to various weapons rather than just giving you “+1 to waving a sword about”. And you can build a better relationship with your horse and wear all kinds of patchwork armour combinations, and people will react not only to your weapon being sheathed or unsheathed, but to the blood splattered on it, and on your clothes. They’ll even react to visible damage on your garments, perhaps seeing you as not all that classy, but definitely a little bit scary if your armour’s dented and battered.

I have no idea how all of that will work out in that massive open world, but as someone who spends almost as much time creating and tweaking characters as actually roleplaying with those characters, I can already see myself spending hours in among all of those skillsets and inventories. I’m hoping, and planning, to see much more of the game soon and that should give me more of an idea as to how the character and the world will relate to one another.

For now, I’m dreaming about saddling up my horse, whispering happy thoughts to it as we head toward the horizon and whatever inns are along the route, and then riding my beer scooter back home when the day is done.